The government has chucked £261,000 at a post-Directgov website that could, if disliked by taxpayers, be ditched before the site hits beta stage.
Alpha.gov.uk launched this morning, and like many recent online efforts from the Coalition, it has gone public as an "early draft" to test the reaction of British citizens.
If they …

COMMENTS

Mission statement

Given the way Government departments, Local Government areas etc all now seem to have to attach some pseudo-babble "mission statement"/"corporate branding" to their name (my favourite from a few years ago was "Mid Beds District Council - striving for unitary status") then a first glance at this website might seem to reveal the new UK Government branding of

Wheel

In other news, the coalition have invented a circular device which can be attached to axles to allow vehicles to move along the road quickly.

Its nice to see some new buzzwords being bounced around and it is doubly nice (in a sadly comical way) to see that the Coalition is intent on doing everything the previous government did while simultaneously claiming it was all rubbish.

Maybe this time round

They'll implement open digital signatures - I seem to remember that they were using some MS - only closed rubbish before AFAIK. I hope their plans are browser agnostic & use proper web standards throughout, rather than stuff they were told to use by Ballmer

"trusted private sector identity service providers"

Ugh

So, on a very brief perusal we have:

Needs javascript enabled before I can enter a location. Oh, and I see that in common with our good friends at the crime site that I also have to enable amazon web services. I will, however, give them plus points for saying that they don't store the location at their end and that it's kept as a cookie.

For a second with that graphic and search bar..

Actually looking pretty good

The current site is a confusing shambles - it looks more like a dodgy price comparison site than a Government website.

Going for a task based search with autocomplete as the main interface is a lot friendlier than some vast index - type in 'driving' and the responses that come back are pretty good. Type in "recycling" and it gives me a link to the right part of my local authority site rather than just dumping me on the homepage (and the 'related item' on the right is "arrange a bulky collection" which again goes to the correct LA subpage). I wonder how they'll manage with 433 Local authorities updating their own sites without a mass of broken links?

Location does need to be entered manually - last time I looked Google thought i was just outside the northern M25 rather than in South London (probably where my ISP's server is) and you need a high degree of accuracy to deal with overlapping local authority and MP areas.

but not on Chrome...

alpha.gov.uk wants to track your physical location

If you click "locate me automatically" and you see that "tracking" instead of "locating" message at the top of your browser, I wonder how many people will think "no, I don't want the government to track me."

IE6

Took a glance...

For maybe 10 seconds and then killed it - you know what - I don't WANT a government website to be full of fluff and zogging great images - I just want it to be really easy to find information (like when the service charge and ground rent are this year for the block of flats I live in).

Just text, maybe a logo or two and a well thought out and implemented menu/category/search system ... that's it thanks.

Concept rather than a technical review

(Disclaimer: I run ScraperWiki, which Alpha.gov used for some of this project)

@The Wegie They've deliberately not made the prototype accessible, see Alpha.gov's blog post about that here. http://blog.alpha.gov.uk/blog/accessibility

@CD001, agreed the front page is deliberately flashy with its Olympics photo. But as soon as you dig into particular apps you're supposed to find exactly what you want - completely lack of flashiness, just the stuff that you need.

@Lamont Cranston, yep they haven't migrated all the content yet. It's a prototype. Makes it harder to tell just how good it would be in the end though.

@Bram, wouldn't it! There are lots of machinations going on inside the civil service. See last couple of pages of Simon Dickson's blog with directgov tag for a feel: http://puffbox.com/tag/directgov/

Testing and staff costs of just Direct.gov are 25 million a year http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/jul/05/government-websites-costs

They've spent 1% of that on prototyping a radically redone user interface, with better citizen engagement, and cost savings.